#JAPAN REACTOR MELTDOWN 2012 VERIFICATION#
His areas of expertise are nuclear verification and safeguards, multilateral nuclear trade policy, international nuclear cooperation, and nonproliferation arrangements. Hibbs is a Germany-based nonresident senior fellow in Carnegie’s Nuclear Policy Program. NISA failed to review simulations conducted by TEPCO and to foster the development of appropriate computer modeling tools.Most importantly, preliminary simulations conducted in 2008 that suggested the tsunami risk to the plant had been seriously underestimated were not followed up and were only reported to NISA on March 7, 2011. Computer modeling of the tsunami threat was inadequate.Insufficient attention was paid to evidence of large tsunamis inundating the region surrounding the plant about once every thousand years.The methods used by TEPCO and NISA to assess the risk from tsunamis lagged behind international standards in at least three important respects: The plant would have withstood the tsunami had its design previously been upgraded in accordance with state-of-the-art safety approaches. Had the plant’s owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), and Japan’s regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), followed international best practices and standards, it is conceivable that they would have predicted the possibility of the plant being struck by a massive tsunami. The Fukushima accident was, however, preventable. The cleanup operation will take decades and may cost hundreds of billions of dollars. The large quantity of radioactive material released has caused significant human suffering and rendered large stretches of land uninhabitable. Public sentiment in many states has turned against nuclear energy following the March 2011 accident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. Mathews Chair and is co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
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